generationally. that's the cycle elf our lives. we have children, we have parents. they have a responsibility to us. we have a responsibility to our children. here is jefferson looking forward into the future with a notion of generational stewardship. our generation for the next generation. we have to make sure that they start with a clean slate, that they can device their own constitution, their own way of living. think -- and this is a figure that jefferson used himself. imagine that when we were boys and girls, we are suited up in good costumes that are appropriate to our age, but then we grow. and we grow. and we outgrow them, all parents know that you have to get a new wardrobe for the kid every six months. well imagine that the child has grown to adulthood. well, you have to have a suit of

clothing appropriate to your age. the constitution, as a suit of clothing. that's his metaphor. something we put on. something we put on to establish our way of being, our way of life, to rule ourselves. that's a little different from the notion of an eternal framework. one that we must fetishize, cherish and worship. and jefferson says to you, you should never treat the constitution, any constitution, as if it were a sacred thing, the arc of the covenant. the constitution is good for what it does. and how we can limit ourselves by establishing rules under which we will live, as long as we live. but those are not rules forever. jefferson is famously known to be a strict constructionist. why is he a strict constructionist? it's precisely because he doesn't worship the

constitution. it's precisely because he wants to hold the authors of that constitution and the first federalist administration to their words. you are telling us this constitution will not destroy our liberties. you are telling us that you are not going to create a consolidated regime like the british imperial monarchal regime. you keep telling us this is a solution for the problems of the states. well, we'll see, won't we? because this is an experiment in republican government. and i am going to hold you to the test. are you violating the things that you said when you sold it to us? were you lying? of course hamilton will say of course we were lying. any good politician would say that. we needed to get this damn thing through. but jefferson would say, in all seriousness, there are fundamental principles.

there are things that can never be changed without violating the spirit of republicanism. and those have been laid out in the declaration. that's something that will never change. that notion of consent, that idea of equality. those are there forever. all the other stuff is like this suit i'm wearing now. we need a new one as we get older. now, you might say, if you were a cynical, 21st century person, jefferson just doesn't want to give madison credit, and he wants to change the conversation to say, you know, the really important document was my document. the declaration. and if this were a two-daikon african-americans, and if i were a little more irreverent, i would have worn the declaration today. but i am instead -- and this doesn't do anybody any good who can't see this, this is the constitution. and as you're going to be told,

it's a deep and important document. who wrote the declaration of independence? who wrote the constitution? but we know who wrote the constitution. that's why we have all this mystifying nonsense about them being founders and framers and larger than life individuals. that's all a form of ancestor worship in the making. we're going to worship these guys. that was the problem with the old regime. you were supposed to worship kings. you were supposed to worship the succession of kings across time. all nonsense. jefferson says, i did not write the declaration of independence. the american people did. i was just the vessel, the medium, through which the american people articulated these eternal truths. and that's the standard against which we need to measure the

constitution. the question is, we the people, as it says toward the bottom of my tie, who are these people? are they really speaking? did governor morris venue trill kwooiz the american people? did they all in one moment speak aloud and say, yes, this will be our law? what were the procedures that get us to the ratification? it's a complicated story. eventually, madison, who, of course, argues against this notion of generational sovereignty. it's nottel practice, it's not prudent, will, in his emphasis on the state ratifying consensual, say that was where the people came together in their capacity as citizens of their states or representatives of the citizens of their states, to speak, and to give life to this document. we, the people, is just a hope when it's written in the constitution.

it becomes real as the people speak. but as i say, the people. do they speak once and then be silent for the rest of time? no. and so jefferson has these two answers. the first is, as i see it, along a temporal axis, through time, that we need a constitutional renewal every generation. i think most civic-minded americans would agree, the last thing any of us want right now is a constitutional convention. philadelphia would love it. they need the business. it would be the epitome, the ultimate climax if we could have another constitutional convention. that's not going to happen. but the idea, the deep principle that jefferson is articulating is very important. how do we speak now? and here's his idea. we speak now in the

consciousness that we do not speak forever. we are not gods. they were not gods. we'll leave the details to david boren. and how to implement all this. there's a second point. and this is the more radical one on which i will conclude in leaving a few minutes for your comments and questions. the second is to use my notion of space of time, of segmenting the people. jefferson says, every generation is like an independent nation with respect to every other nation. imagine, international lawyers are going to have to sort this out. every generation is like a sovereignty. well, let's take that principle and that spirit and see how you can apply it. how you can make it operational. the second idea is to take not that item poral dementia long what we might describe as a vertical axis, but to flip it to the horizontal to think

spatially. here is the solution that jefferson arrived at in his retirement. and that is, divide and subdivide. take the great national republic. break it down to states, to counties, to townships or wards, as he called them. indeed, if you take this regression from top to bottom, you go all the way to the householder, to jefferson himself, and to his neighbors who are sovereign over their own domain. over his own plantation or farm. nobody messes with me on my plantation. that's a basic rule of life and law in the antebellum south. but this principle of division and subdivision enables us to use the majority rule principle as a check against the excesses of majority rule. because those divisions between

the national or federal republic in which we act as if we were one, and when jefferson is president, he acts for us, under the assumption we are one with respect to the rest of the world. and we might have is to act with dispatch, we might have to suspend rule of law. we might have to respond to the injunctions of the first law of nature and, folks, that's self preservation. number one, the first law of nature. no country, no constitution. country comes first. but then you move down from the federal level to the state level. and those states have rights. that are invialable. they have rights against each other. states can't encroach on each other. now, i know all of you serious constitutional scholars and historians will say federalism is very complicated. and yet again, jefferson is

indulging in what we might describe as a thought experiment. but here is what this experiment yields. because at the federal level, we operate by majority rule, where the delegates of the states, senators, the representatives coming from directs or from general elections in the states they operate under majority rule, principle. same thing applies at the state level. but one thing you can't to at the federal level is to interfere with the states within the proper sphere of their authority. and the same principle goes down all the way to the bottom. in fact, i've described it as moving from top to bottom, what we really discovered, it's the bottom that's important. that's where the spirit of the revolution of 1776, of the rights that we hold dear and sacred, those rights are the foundation of this republic. they must be secure.

secure against majorities at a higher level, but they must be governed by the democratic majority rule principle at their own level. does this begin to make some kind of sense? he's divided the world. it's not going to be checks and balances within the federal government. it's federalism of itself that is constitutionalism. and it's only a federal regime that can truly, can truly adhere to the foundational principle of democracy. majority rule. we have divided the country into many, many, many jurisdictions. many governments. all of which govern themselves, all of which have invialable rights with respect to each other. all of which delegate powers upward to achieve common goals, collective security, the national good, whatever that is. the end of global warming. you can fill it in, as you will.

we delegate up you ward to achieve common interests. and at every level, at every level, we have a selection of individuals who can best represent, articulate and understand those common interests. and that's a kind of refinement, to borrow the term from james madison and gordon wood. a kind of refinement, so that it is a fantasy of a kind of continental mare to go raes where those at the top will have the wisdom to see beyond their own petty interests and to see the collective interest et al. well, i've gone on for too long. but what i wanted to articulate is this fundamental tension between democracy, between our sense of citizens as having power over how we are fwochbed and ruled, having a say, participatory democracy. and the notion of security in

our rights, of predictability, of rule of law. for better or worse, and whether or not he came up with a viable solution, jefferson recognized a tension, which we overlook at our peril. the tension between a government based on our collective will, whatever that is, and a notion that vested rights and interests and property, the modern versions of air stock raes, corporate wealth and power, the new inequality, all of these things are beyond our reach, because they're just there. they are our version of the dead hand of the past. thank you.

did i disgrace myself? >> no, that was wonderful. >> thank you very much, peter, for such an insightful and provocative remarks. you've left us all thinking. i want to pause in the middle before i ask for questions from the audience. i notice that our incoming chair and vice chair of the board of regents are both here this morning. they've been great supporters of this program, and i'm really glad that both of them are here. our incoming chair, dr. leslie rainbow-forbes, and our incoming vice chair, rick dunning. could you both please stan? thank you very much. we have a microphone down here at the front. and if anyone has a question, i think it would be easiest just to walk down to the microphone and hopefully as some of are you making your way, and there are a lot of students i see in the

balco balcony. you can make your way down and ask a question. while people are coming to the microphone, let me ask you the question. jefferson, with all of his intense focus on democracy itself, and on the fact that each generation has -- is sovereign, as it comes into place, do you think jefferson would trust this generation enough, their commitment to particularly not exercising their own rights at the expense of others, those who might be unpopular, for example, to have their right of free speech, guaranteed in the bill of rights, all of the other things we can think. would -- and you think about the classical education. some were self-educated. but yet they had read broadly of the political philosophers. compare that to the american population. how long and how deeply have

they felt this. how much have they lifted up unselfishness and what we might call civic virtue. in other words, not the position of don't tax me, tax the other person. don't cut my benefits. cut someone else's benefits. are we prepared as a generation to assume the sovereign power that jefferson talked about to rewrite our constitution again? >> i get to answer that question. that's great. take -- you're taking notes. take this down. one of the points i wanted to make is that if you have problems with us, they had problems with them. never forget that. that's the original ism that we should channel. that is the sense of risk of danger and the lack of trust they had in each other. if you think republicans and democrats can't get along, well, that's not a question here in oklahoma, because there aren't anymore democrats. but if -- well, people in

jefferson's age had profound reasons not to trust each other. and to be afraid that the world would really be turned upside down. and what's remarkable about jefferson, of course, what the revolution pore tended for people like jefferson, was destruction of the master class. these are real concerns. that is, they're sitting on a time bomb. it's not just that they can't get along with their neighbors. it's much more pro found than that. i would say, david, in response to your question, this is for better and worse. we hike to tell ourselves that we do well in bad times. when we get nostalgic about the greatest war or the greatest generation or the greatest period in american heft, we tend

to focus on periods like, say, the 1850s when everything really did fall apart. when the constitution failed. i like to tell my students, don't get too excited about a constitution, which is all about slavery and happily had to be -- well, changed, to be honest. we say amended in the civil war amendments. that was a moment in which we nearly lost control completely. in fact, it's lincoln's great achievement to establish connection -- a fresh connection with the founding, but particularly with jefferson's version of the founding, that is with the declaration. that those principles needed to be defended. this -- let this experiment not fail. this is the hope for the world, and this is a 19th century in which nations are beginning to their their right to govern themselves. this is the century of the revolutions of 1848, the failed revolutions of 1848, on behalf of nationhood.

let's show that we can overcome our own tremendous problems and keep the thing -- keep the spirit alive. so if we're good at making war, and if lincoln was good at sustaining an idea of something worth preserving at the cost of so many lives. and if we honor that now. and if in doing that he honored jefferson, then there is a thin, vital connection that links us across the generations. it's war, it's crisis, it's catastrophe. if you're into this kind of thinking, things will have to get a little bit worse before we come to our senses. is that happening now? is this the 1850s now? this is not my period. i'm barely alive anymore. i'm not going to -- i will say, and i don't mean this to be the usual sort of pieious -- it's

going to sound this way. it's up to us. it really is. it's your sense of what the crisis is. do you really think that our biggest enemies are the people biggest enemies are the people that disagree with us about entitlements or about what we say about god in public places? are you kidding me? if that's what gets you excited, then, yes, we could be in our own end time. do we have the vision to see what it is that we confront as a people? are we a people? really a question that goes back to a question i posed at the beginning, are we a people or not? >> it absolutely was. questions? you want to ask a question? >> since apparently nobody else wants to step up, i'll try to

get it rolling. a couple of resounding jeffersonian ideas you mentioned, state rights and agrarianism have both suffered from a kind of guilt by association because of subsequent generations i think, association specifically with defense of slavery, secession, and jim crow. i'm just wondering if you could reflect on post-jeffersonian history and suggest that maybe some of these constitutional notions of -- that jefferson emphasized and saw as essential to the preservation of a republic, if you could suggest how we might view, you know, localism and popular control in ways that could disassociate

those notions from their unfortunate but i don't think necessarily containing association. >> thank you. >> well, i've been inspirational this morning, that's why i get paid the big bucks. no, i shouldn't have said that. that was awful. that's a wonderful question and it's a serious problem. i don't know if you can extricate the ideas from their context and implications and history, of states' rights and even more distressingly jefferson's notion of ward republics is the sovereignty of the planter over his plantation. it's the most powerful justification of slavery in the early republic and that is a question of rights. the property rights, the family rights, domestic -- i mean, this is the domestic sphere, this is the family values, the householder, the patriarch, jefferson, controlling 200 people as if he with their

father. i think that's our challenge. because i do think those ideas speak to something vitally important and that is the connection as i tried to put it between our sense of being children, parents and ultimately ancestors as we move through the generations. can we think about our own welfare and that of our children and think about everybody's welfare? i think jefferson offers us the opportunity to reflect on these issues. i don't think he has all the answers, but what he certainly does in the declaration of independence is to articulate what has now been received as a notion of human rights or natural right. they were bounded for jefferson himself by the circumstances of his time, all men are created equal does not mean that the captive and enslaved africans have those rights now. one day they would. jefferson really has a vision of what i would call a republican

millennium or a democratic millennium when one day we would reach the end of history. when all peoples would be free including enslaved africans. but the historic associations of robust democracy at these lower levels of localism and those things that we hate most today is very, very powerful. can we take the civic energy of participation and engagement and defending our own interests and jefferson's all for that but can that we reconciled with a sense of something beyond ourselves, you might say that's the great crisis of our times and all times of american history, the tension between the local, the particular, and the self-interested and some kind of broader sense of identification with each other, as a people, with the peoples of the world. so, that's another glib and unhelpful answer. i'm good at this. i recommend -- i would really like everybody to come to the mike so this could be a true

jeffersonian revival. if that's going to happen, however, nobody else gets to speak today and/or every question has to be answerable by yes or no. >> you have to start the next program in about five minutes, so to stay on schedule today. such an intellectual feast the courses will be served very quickly, but this will have to be our last question, i'm sorry. maybe you can save the next questions or our speaker about george washington and there's certainly some conflicting ideas between the two of them. yes, go ahead. >> if you were channeling jefferson, how would you advise the people who are occupying wall street? >> well, i know jefferson. he lives in williamsburg. we call him bill barker, but he's a jefferson impersonator

and i'll send bill up to wall street. i don't know. the thing is jefferson hates banks. you got to understand that about jefferson. he hates the kind of mysterious control that's exercised over our lives and deprives us of our liberties. now, it's not just a simple knee jerk populist reaction to the masters of the universe, though it has some flavor of that as well. i think he would say the energy and the kind of participation and he would say this to tea parties as well, that this is a civic resource. but can it be more than it is now? the criticism of the wall street people is that they don't have a program. it's not their fault. i mean, this is an existential crisis for unemployable college graduates. there are students here, i need to be careful. talk about the living generation. i don't know, is this generation going to get a chance. i think this is something i get to articulate my own -- when

pretending to talk about jefferson. i think jefferson would have been appalled by the inequality that characterizes the united states of america today. we can try to conjure it away by talking about how competition and markets will produce virtuous outcomes and we all benefit from a growing economy. but there are elements, and i think this is what jefferson would be sentized to today, he was always on the lookout for aristocracies, but there are aristocrats in our midst. and they will do anything they can to become rent seekers. take your pick to live off the bounty of the productive labor of others. i have to say, given jefferson's commitment to a substantive notion of equality which included violation of property

rights, jefferson didn't think property was sacred, because that's exactly the principle of the old regime is that what is must be. i think jefferson would be in deep sympathy. but he'd also be in deep sympathy with populists on the right, the sense of dissatisfaction that we're not talking about the things that matter to us, however we might question the motives and the programs of those people who are out in the streets now making life ugly and difficult, they are expressing something important, and i think jefferson would say, as he said about shea's rebellion, a little rebellion now and then can be a good thing. it's like a storm in the atmosphere. we have storms in our atmosphere. we got the weather channel, so we can track them at all times and i think we need to have a political weather channel that will produce higher wisdom beyond the shawatching people

suffering. starting sunday, see the winners in this year's c-span student cam video documentary video competition on the theme of the constitution and you as middle and high school students from across the country showed which part of the constitution was important to them and why. we'll air the top 27 videos each morning each morning on c-span and you'll meet the students who created them on "washington journal." for a preview of the winning videos, check studentcam.org. ronald reagan was leaving this hotel after delivering a speech to the afl-cio. he comes out, he can't believe he's this close. 15 feet from the president. the agents surround him, he shoots six shots. the d.c. police officer turned around to check on the president's progress and gets hit in the back and says i'm hit. now the path to the president is clear. wide open. hinkley has an effective range of 20 to 30 feet. he's done target practice. he can hit